Month: February 2016

I debated the title of this post for quite a while, knowing that it would bring me some serious mickey-taking.  In the end, what the hell.

Some of you may have noticed that I started growing a beard just before Christmas. It started off, frankly, from laziness.  Either I could spend an extra five minutes in bed, or I could shave.  It’s a no-brainer.  And after a while I decided to leave it and see what happened.  I could start a new job, in a new country, with new facial hair.  And I began to get rather attached to it.  It became a bit of a project.  My colleagues at Sumitomo even helped me out with a bottle of beard oil.  Really.

After a couple of weeks in Charleston, I decided the beard should have a bit of a tidy up.  So I booked an appointment at the Old South Barber Spa and popped out of the office at lunchtime, thinking I’d be back within half an hour or so.  It’s in an old, typical Charleston building downtown, with gas lamps burning outside and a small courtyard.  Though it was February and a little chilly, at least by Charleston standards, it’s easy to imagine the courtyard on a steamy summer day.  Inside, it’s a mass of dark wood and black leather.

I settled down in the chair for my quick haircut.  After 15 minutes, with a hot towel over my face, I thought my thirty minute target might have been optimistic.  Fifteen minutes and three hot towels later, and I was getting a little worried about how long I’d been away from my desk.  Forty-five minutes in: I was having oils massaged into my face.  I no longer cared about work.  Finally, after an hour, I had the finishing touches and emerged blinking into the sunlight.  A new man!

(picture borrowed from someone else’s blog – thanks)

Awesome as it was, I don’t think I can be going back to the Old South too often.  It feels like the sort of place you should save for a special occasion.  So, much more prosaically, I bought an electric shaver from CVS.  Coupled with my beard oil, this should help me replicate at least some of the barber’s handiwork.  Actually, she was called Danielle.

 

 

We’ve been here for just over a month now and, to be honest, it seems like forever.  Our life in London is fast receding into a dim and distant memory.  A haze of delayed trains, standing up on the Waterloo & City Line and dubious weather.

Monday was Presidents’ Day, which meant a day off school for Alice.  It was also the day that our shipping container arrived.  The journey from the UK had been much quicker than we had expected so we were slightly unprepared for a delivery this quickly.  In fact, the house we are renting is still pretty much furnished so right now it has double the volume of stuff in it.  Amazingly, it’s big enough just to have soaked up all the excess boxes and it still doesn’t feel crowded!

What both Charlie and I have found quite interesting is how little we missed all our stuff.  Yes, it’s all here now which is nice, but we both feel like we could have carried on quite comfortably without all the paraphernalia that so many people seem to think is an essential part of life.  Finally I understand how some people can spend all their lives with a suitcase, a laptop and a Kindle.

Alice, on the other hand, was very excited to receive all her furniture, books and toys.  Her room was the first to be assembled – and right now is still the only one that has been assembled! – but she is re-acquainting herself with her desk, Famous Five books and sewing kit.

The only slight hiccup in the delivery came when they tried to move the piano, which apparently weighs in at 800lb.  How to make yourself popular with a removal crew…

 

Aside from our furniture arriving, the other big event in South Carolina right now is the forthcoming Presidential primary: this Saturday for Republicans and the following week for Democrats.  I know that primary season involves all the candidates taking ever more extreme positions to the right or left to energise their support base, but this year feels particularly unedifying.  Certainly on the Republican side, none of the candidates is acting very presidential right now, and the Democrats aren’t without their flaws either.  I suppose it’s for the best that as an “alien” I don’t get to vote.  Taxation without representation!

 

(Warning: this post contains self-congratulatory language that may upset those of a shy and retiring nature.)

 

It was about 2013 when we first thought about moving to the US, and it took until 2016 to make it happen.  That’s about on a par with my speed at getting served at a bar… The main thing that took so long was for us to find a way of earning money.  America is a great place to live with a certain amount of money, but not such a great place without.

For those readers who don’t know, I fell out of a couple of music degrees and blagged my way into the weird and wonderful world of commodities trading.  In fifteen years, I had a lot of fun: I visited coffee plantations in India, rice warehouses in West Africa, gold refineries in Singapore, sugar buyers in Moscow, mining companies in Australia – and any number of dodgy bars and karaoke clubs in Tokyo… The easiest thing would have been for me to stay in the same area, but find a job in the US.  Plenty of commodities traders in the US, right?  Well yes, there are – but none of them were anywhere we wanted to live.  If you are going to move to New York, we thought, you might as well stay in London.  (Cue uproar from New Yorkers saying their city is much better than London, and from Londoners saying that moving to New York is a step down.  But what I actually meant was that there is not much difference in lifestyle.)

What we wanted was to move somewhere warm, where we weren’t in a small house or apartment in the middle of a big city.  For a while we thought about the west coast and, by chance, there is a precious metals dealer based in Santa Monica.  Bingo!  Hole in one!  They’d definitely like me to work for them.  Then I could go straight from the office to the beach to learn surfing after work.  Er… unfortunately it didn’t work out.  They met with me a couple of times, and said they were interested – just not interested enough.

From then, I started approaching all sorts of investment firms, hedge funds, money managers, in LA and San Diego.  Some of them even replied to me, but of course the answers were always the same: we don’t need someone with your skill set.

That was 2013 used up.  2014 was when we first visited Charleston, and we decided to refocus our efforts on this area instead.  Let’s be honest, Charleston does not have a big financial services sector, though it is growing, so I needed to reinvent myself.  Charleston is becoming a tech hub (Silicon Harbor, in fact) and for a while I tried to get into software sales or business development but again, my skill set was a bit too obscure.

And at some point, I began to have an epiphany: I’m in the middle of my career.  It’s not enough to send someone your CV and say “Can you help me?”  That’s what you do when you are just starting.  At my stage in life, you have to tell people how you can help them.  You play up your skills and your experience, and you sell yourself.  Again: it’s not just enough to say “I have transferable skills”, you have to say “I have these skills and I can apply them to your business, to help you make more money, by…”  And you make contacts: not just to help you to get a job, but just to have a network.

Maybe that’s not a very profound insight, but to me it really was.  I apologise to those of you who are thinking “yeah, and?”

So when I visited Charleston for two weeks in the summer of 2015*, I was re-invigorated.  I had a shiny new LinkedIn profile that was up-to-date and quite pushy.  I arranged meetings with a bunch of people, just to connect with them and to see what happened.

And then, the husband of a friend of my wife said “oh, you should get in touch with…”  I did, of course, and we started a dialogue.  Nothing happened immediately, but I was persistent and at the end of September I flew to Charleston for four hours for an interview.  After that I stayed calm but persistent (silently screaming inside, of course) until, two months later, a job offer appeared.  Two and a half years after we first started looking!

What did I learn?  You’ve got to sell yourself, network, and be persistent.  It’s all quite un-English, which is why it was a long lesson to learn.  But I did it, and I am proud of myself.

And this is my new office:

 

 

*  Charlie and Alice were here for 5 weeks

This is my first week at my new job and I’m a bit too busy to write a lot, so here is a small listicle. (That’s a terrible word and I apologise for using it.  It won’t happen again.)